Yaakov Menken, director of the Coalition for Jewish Values, said, “Joseph Massad does not belong on the faculty of any serious academic institution.”
“He believes that rape, beheading of babies, kidnapping, and mass murder are all legitimate ‘resistance’ to ‘Israeli settler-colonialism’— in other words because the victims are primarily Jews,” Menken said.
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He also criticized Columbia for allowing Massad to teach the course because it is focused on a revisionist history in which a European “colonialist moniker, ‘Palestinian,’ applies uniquely to a subset of Arabs and excludes Jews.”
“The course, being antisemitic incitement from beginning to end, directly creates an environment of hate and bigotry against Jewish students,” Menken told The Fix.
“If it does not cancel the course, Columbia proves it deserves no federal funding…” he said.
Similarly, columnist and MIT student Eyal Yakoby wrote, “American higher education continues to show the country that it is both filled with radicals and a waste of money” on X.
George Mason University law Professor Adam Mossoff also condemned the course in a post on X, stating, “This means @Columbia university will now hire members of the Nazi party to teach the history of World War II and KKK members to teach post-Civil War history.”
“It’s exactly the same as having an explicit pro-Hamas supporter and cheerleader for October 7 teach about Zionism,” he stated.
In response, many have rallied behind an online petition that condemns Massad’s comments in his The Electronic Intifada article and demands his removal from the university.
In the article, Massad wrote, “The sight of the Palestinian resistance fighters storming Israeli checkpoints separating Gaza from Israel was astounding.”
“No less awesome were the scenes witnessed by millions of jubilant Arabs who spent the day watching the news, of Palestinian fighters from Gaza breaking through Israel’s prison fence or gliding over it by air,” he wrote.
The petition has garnered nearly 80,000 signatures and claims that many students “feel unsafe in the presence of a professor who supports the horrific murders of civilians.”
“We call on Columbia University to hold Massad responsible for his comments and immediately remove him from the Columbia faculty,” the petition reads.
Earlier this year, Columbia University President Minouche Shafik told Congress that Professor Massad had been reprimanded and removed from his position on the Academic Review Committee. However, Massad remains in good standing and has denied being punished after his Oct. 8 op-ed, The Fix previously reported.
The Yavneh Board, the Orthodox student community on Columbia’s campus, told The Fix that it does not “wish to comment” at this time.
Professor Massad, Columbia University, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the school’s Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies, the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter, the Middle Eastern Studies Association, and Koach, the Traditional-Egalitarian community of Conservative Jewish students at Columbia, did not respond to multiple requests for comment about the course.
Cover Image: Columbia reinstated Gaza Solidarity Encampment, day 5 wide by عباد ديرانية in WikiMedia Commons, Creative Commons 1.0